Abstract

Despite its claims to human equality, liberal democracy is embedded in a "noble lie" concerning the phenomenology of human nature, as propounded in the discourse of the classical canon. For while in theory liberal democracy views man as a rational being, in practice people's social status is determined by the purported capacity for reason in their soul. In effect the level of personhood that people might justly claim in civic society is overtly linked to categorically prescribed distinctions such as age, gender, and ethnicity. Hence an idealist vision of the world lends itself as an instrument of moral domination toward a manifest social vision for society. Thus I delineate the Greeks' confluence of philosophy and politics as invidious humanism, seeing its heritage come to a head with today's multiculturalism. ;I examine two canonical works, Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Emile, through the perspective of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, in which he entreats liberal education to return to the classical canon rather than embrace the fate of multiculturalism, which he sees as a fate that the Greeks succeeded in overcoming by arranging human life according to nature. I revisit these two seminal books on pedagogy from which humanity, supposedly, can gain the rational way of life which inheres in human nature. ;My historicist view is that Plato, Rousseau, and Bloom respectively espouse a particular historical doctrine which gathers around the growing discourse of their specific philosophical tradition, rather than a universal and timeless canon for the ages. Invariably, however, I find that the classical literary canon is broadly based on a metaphysical platform which derives from an idealist worldview that inadvertently tends to justify the ideological class structure of the powers that be. ;I conclude that since we are unable to overcome this moral framework, we would best thrive in liberal society simultaneously as private individuals within our own moral sphere and as public citizens according to the ethical domain sanctioned by laws, no longer deluding ourselves that human beings might be enabled to obtain cross-cultural rational community--short of moral dogmatism